Global Warming Wash Out

The Kyoto Protocol can now be ignored for another five years.

December 14, 2011

As global warming conferences go, the one that ended Sunday in Durban, South Africa was, by common consensus, a wash out.

The COP-17 meeting—so named by the United Nations bureaucracy to indicate that this is the 17th go-around—was supposed to come up with a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires next year. What emerged was an agreement of sorts to extend the Protocol, never ratified by the U.S., to 2017. Yet Russia and Japan have said they'll ignore the extension, Australia is wavering, and yesterday Canada...